Anyone who talks about writing, or writes about talking, makes a point of condemning dead phrases. These denunciations, while effective and sometimes eloquent, change nothing. The enemies of cliches come and go, but cliches persist.
Everyone seems to agree that cliches stifle writing and thinking. In politics they're downright dangerous. Vaclav Havel, hero of the Czech struggle against the Soviets, claims that cliches, by supporting accepted ways of thinking, encourage dictatorships: "The cliche organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defence lawyer, judge and the law."
Thirty-five years ago Walter Ong, a great student of language, described the anti-cliche campaign in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: "Cliches have for many years now been hunted down mercilessly with a view to total extermination." More recently, Martin Amis expanded that metaphor in his book of essays, The War Against Cliche. Ideally, he claimed all writing opposes cliche, including cliches of the mind and heart. "When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice."
But if you open a newspaper, or watch the TV news, you're likely to be told that wolves are appearing in sheep's clothing, someone is killing someone else with kindness, fools aren't suffered gladly, X is a poster child for Y, and today's fast-paced society is causing widespread stress.
Meanwhile, some helpful soul will explain (as if it had been discovered recently) that most of an iceberg lies below the water, out of sight, like certain problems. Expressions like these fill the air around us. Just the other night on TV I heard it said that some commentator was a boy crying wolf.[...]
Observant readers can take innocent pleasure in the appearance of attachment-cliches, in which one word serves as the inevitable accessory of another. In newspapers we write about only one kind of hoax, the elaborate hoax. In book reviews (as Tom Payne noted in the London Telegraph) epics are all sprawling, quibbles minor, insights penetrating and roller coasters emotional. Scholarship, if worn, is worn lightly.
Contest time. You are invited to share your examples of modern cliches that thwart intelligent or even intelligible debate on the war on terror and/or climate change. There are no limits, so enter often. There are no prizes either.
6 comments:
I think the much maligned cliché is just shorthand for quick communication amongst us ordinary folks. Great writers and thinkers say something totally original and brilliant and we lesser beings use their words to convey a meaning we all can understand.
Are words taken from poetry like, an honest politician is as rare as a day in June, considered clichés. Probably, but then until as long as James Russell Lowell doesn't mind, I'll use his words instead of my own lesser ones.
One of my least favorite modern cliches is the habit of public persons enunciating every family relationship that they participate in. So you will get someone saying "I'm a mother, wife, sister, daughter, grandmother, grandchild, aunt,.."
Blech! Enough already.
Other annoying modern cliches:
"Think of the children!"
"I'm there for you."
"You can change the world!"
"This is my way of 'giving back'."
"We all left our egos at the door."
"(name of scandal)-Gate."
My 'favourite' is "The US drove a coach and horses through international law", with the variant "rode roughshod over..."
erp is right. Clichés are modularized language. It may not be exactly what you want, but it's close enough and easy to plug in.
If you really want to hate clichés, though, just think of them as archetypical memes.
As Shakespeare might say of cliche-writers: "they have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps."
Here's one for your collection:
"A country like Iraq which is blessed ... with the largest potential of natural resources [and] the highest quality of human resources, has been brought to its knees by human hands"
Paolo Lembo
UNDP Iraq director
Post a Comment